Mastering the command line like a hacker by Xiaodong Xu

The book focuses on bash and zsh, which is great since I use both of those shells.

The useful sections from the book include:

Zsh Completion

# ~/.zshrc
autoload -U compinit
compinit -i

source ~/dotfiles/zsh-autosuggestions/zsh-autosuggestions.zsh

The zsh-autosuggestions.zsh needs to be installed/downloaded from Github, adding as a seperate depo or adding as a submodule to your dotfiles depo.

History

BASH History

# ~/.bashrc
# Save 5000 lins of history, with the same scroll back in the terminal
HISTFILESIZE=5000
HISTSIZE=5000

# Do not save duplicate commands, ignore commands starting with a space
HISTCONTROL='erasedups:ignorespace'

ZSH History

# ~/.zshrc 
# Save 5000 lins of history, with the same scroll back in the terminal
SAVEHIST=5000
HISTSIZE=5000

# Do not save duplicate commands, ignore commands starting with a space
setopt HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS
setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE

Using History

View the last 5 commands

# Bash
$ history 5
# Zsh
$ history -5

For zsh we can see the last time the command was run and the time taken with :

history -i -D

Alternative command to history:

fc

Searching History

The most common way is piping history through grep to search.

$ history | grep 'cmd'

Ctrl+r is another option which starts a reverse search through the history.

Ctrl+p and Ctrl+n can be used to scroll forwards and backwards through previous commands. Although for me the up down cursors workk mor enaturally.

Repeating Commands

Repeat the last command used (Bang Bang)

!!

great example is when you run a command but it fails because of require Superuser access.

$ cmd_that_needs_root
> fail
$ sudo !!
> yay!

Execute command 2 back.

!-2
#Note
!! => !-1

Execute command 100 from history

!100

Last Argument

!$ recalls the last Argument. typicall usage could be with mkdir and cd:

$ mkdir notes
$ cd !$